"Oh, Izzy!"
It was sweet Qalu that Islana heard first, her Waverly accent lilting, and sweet Qalu that Islana saw first; her red, red mouth was pulled into the horrific ever-smiling scar-grimace that would be the maid's sole prize from the Selection, even as those just like her left with money and dresses and thrones. It was true what had been said about Qalu all those months ago, when the wound was fresh and bloody - she had never needed help smiling, but now her smile was an ugly, mutilated thing.
And Islana thought she would cry with happiness when she saw it. She didn't like people to call her Izzy, but in that moment she was glad for it, glad for the concern and affection in which the diminutive was mired. The king was dead.
And with Qalu, the others - pale Reesa who moved like her nerves were sparking, and sultry-eyed Calli who had limbs of glass, and Jess with her steady gaze and steady hands, and thorny, hot-headed Jen, who wore her apron curled around her fist like brass knuckles made of cloth.
And still more and yet more, all of those girls whose shadows had become like Islana's own, who were invisible girls too and could not ever be beautiful no matter how beautiful they were.
The maids.
So often Islana forgot that although Angrec had been her first friend here, she had not been her last.
She straightened herself from where she had sat, listless and purposefully unthinking, at an empty table in an empty kitchen, and she wiped at her dry eyes with the edge of her sleeve - a faux pas, and one no good maid would ever be caught committing, but in that moment on that day with all things considered it did not seem, to Islana, so dreadfully important. The king was dead.
"Girls," she began, as she stood up, sliding her chair back with a scream. She faltered. Again. "Girls," she said,and then Jen moved forward and enveloped her in a hug and Islana lost her voice to whispering, shuddering shock once more as she felt the other girl's arms wrap around her and heard the whispered, "I'm so sorry," and remembered that the king was dead, the king was dead, the king was dead and she had seen him die.
They drew back from another, and Islana faced the girls and their questioning, querying eyes.
"What was it like?" Petra was the only one brave enough to ask.
"He just stopped," she said, and that was true. "He just... ceased." And that was true too.
Islana had seen men die before, but death had always seemed a violent thing, a vulture with talons of bone that tore the heart from the living and stole the breath from the dying. Rebel attacks had never caused anyone to just... cease. Rebel attacks killed, and left bloody deaths behind.
Even at home, when Islana had seen a man overcome by a - she didn't know what, a heart attack or a brain aneurysm or a stroke - even then it had been violent in its movements, that death. The man had swayed and pitched and fallen into Islana's father's arms and had drawn a two last great shuddering breaths as he died, like there were marbles rattling in his lungs.
"He just stopped," she said again.
The next few minutes were lost to the scent of cloth and muted perfume and the haze of hair as the girls in their dozens crowded together to hug and whisper and support one another, a mess of people and eyes and limbs and kindness, all black and white uniforms and shining shoes, and Islana thought that any one of these maids, these girls, were worth ten times the Selected, all of them.
If Julien was to chose a queen, he could do a lot worse than kind Qalu or sensible Olivia or passionate Jen.
Or poor, sweet Angrec, whose death had not been gentle.
Calli poured the tea, and broke the news, after the first rush of comfort had come to an end like a tide breaking over the sand. Her back was straight, her eyes averted, as she expertly aimed for the teacups. She had been one of Demetrius' distractions before the Selection began, but now the prince was busy seducing Selected Threes, and Islana thought Calli was all the stronger for it. She had a keen ear for gossip and rumours - all good maids did.
"There's whispers," Calli said, and Islana stared down at her scarred, scarred hands and flexed them silently and wondered. The king was dead.
"Whispers," Angie repeated, and the word was echoed by Litta and Reesa and Sarah and others, until it gradually dissipated into the silence of the kitchen. "Whispers?"
"Murder," Islana said. Her voice was hoarse - she had spent it all on prayers. "They're whispering of treason and deceit and murder. Right?"
Calli pressed her lips together. "Right," she said, and Jen swore and cracked her teacup in her hand.
"Them," she said, and there was no question of who she meant.
"Them?"
"They wouldn't dare."
"Do you really think they'd be Selected if..."
"But why?"
"Forget why. How?" said one, maybe Sarah or Talia or Petra, near the furnace.
"Poison," guessed Yareñe, who was Honduraguan and a Five by birth, and therefore by nature prone to flights of fantasy no matter how improbable. Her slender, pianist fingers drew circles around the rim of her teacup as though trying to whittle a song from its china edge.
"Poison," Qalu whispered. "The food..."
"So not them," Islana said. "Us."
Silence crackled in the room and Islana stared at the tiny ripples in the glassy surface of her tea, and knew that it had not been any of the maids. She would rather go to her death than believe that kind of treachery from her girls - and they were her girls.
Even if they had done, she thought, they'd have the decency to tell her about it afterwards.
Islana was silent, as were the others, until she heard the clicking clickclackclack of boots drawing near and she looked up to the door to see two guards standing, almost awkwardly but unmistakeable in their air. They were waiting - expectantly.
She knew them, as she knew everyone in the palace - Dhoka and Harrison, low in ranking at the garrison, one handsome and one weather-worn, one old and one young, both kind-hearted in their own stoic, unsmiling way.
"Islana Loss," Harrison said. His voice cracked. The king was dead. "Please. Come with us."
Islana rose uncertainly. She stared at them.
"I don't understand," she said, and said no more.
"Iz," Dhoka said quietly. He raised his eyes from the floor to meet her gaze. She could remember seeing love reflected in those eyes. The king was dead. "Come on."
The eyes of the other maids burned into her back, but they said nothing as Islana was led away.
The king was still dead.
"You don't have any pictures up here. Of your family."
It wasn't a question, but it came as quietly as one, carried on the merest exhale of breath in the silence and the dark and she stared at the ceiling and felt his hair against hers while she rolled her answer across her tongue, measured and yet curt.
"No."
"The other girls do."
"How many of the other girls' bedrooms have you seen?"
East sat up and looked at Demetrius, watched the shadows of the dying sun playing chase across the sharp bones of his face. Shadowed as they were in dark rings of grief and tiredness, his dark eyes were closed - she liked him better that way. When he couldn't see her.
"Are you jealous?"
Oh, he tried to make it mocking, mischievous, but the exhaustion caught at the edges of his words and dragged them down so that it almost sounded sincere.
She didn't like to hear him sound sincere. Demetrius was only sincere when the situation was bad.
She said, "Charlotte's my friend."
And there it was - the murmur of a hum escaping from the corners of an arrogant mouth, the movement of the thinnest of paper-thin skin over his throat where his heart juddered out a pulse, the slightest shudder of eyelashes as though he were seeing something she could not.
One liar recognises another.
"You don't have friends."
"Nor do you. Or you wouldn't be here. You'd have gone to them."
She drew her legs up under herself, equal parts cat and girl, and leaned her head back against the wall.
The first thing she had done in this room - after throwing open the balcony doors, of course, so that she was not parted for long from the sky - was push the king-sized four-poster silk-sheeted bed into the comer. It was less exposed that way, she thought, although she rarely slept in this bed anyway and although it did mean that it could become a little cramped at times such as this, when Demetrius lay across the bed and she sat out the head of it, and she could feel his breath as he inhaled and exhaled.
"Aren't you my friend, Eight?"
She shuddered out a laugh. "Quit calling me that. I'm a Three now, yeah?"
She knew he would smile before he did.
"Are you going to be a teacher, then, Smith?"
"I could be a scientist," she said. "A librarian. A lecturer."
The last one was said in the hushed tones of the reverent, but she couldn't keep her gunpowder laugh back for long, and he chuckled with her.
She stared at the ceiling as the changing shapes of the gloom marked the last oozings of the hours passing.
"Shit," Demetrius said, and she looked down to see him press the heel of his hands to his eyes. "I wish I could -" And he left the end of his sentence unspoken, but she knew anyway.
"When my mother died," East said, slowly. "My little sister cried for twelve days."
"I didn't know you had a sister."
"I don't. I was trying to make you feel better."
His smile was weak. Sweet. Real.
"You're doing a good job."
East shrugged. This wasn't what she did. If she was at home - if it had been Sario or Brenin or Jonath in his position - she knew what she would have done. She would have taken her machete and told him to take his, and they would have waited until dark, they would have gone out, more wolf than human, and they would have-
Ah, but she was Selected now.
The Selection had never mattered to her less.
"I don't have a sister," she admitted into the silence.
"You have a brother."
"More than one."
"Aren't they awful?"
She said, "While they're breathing."
He looked at her. "You like your secrets."
It was true. Getting facts from East was pulling teeth from a chicken. "I don't have many," she said. "They're not worth much. So I protect them."
"Did your mother die? Was that part true?"
"Yes," she said. "That part was true."
"How?"
A simple question without a simple answer.
"Some people can't take it," she said. "At home. Sometimes - it's constant, and they just can't keep their hearts beating. The hunger. The weariness. The fear, all the time. Not knowing. Or, sometimes knowing. If they get you alone..." She shrugged. "I think it was the hunger," she said. "That got my mother. And knowing it wasn't going to end, not any time soon."
"I knew a boy like that."
"Yeah?" she said.
"He saw it," he said. "In his dreams."
"Yeah," she said.
She lightly touched his hair. Sometimes she forgot he had been a soldier. Now she remembered.
"I had to bury her," she said. Quietly. He would understand. "There were mass graves, but I - you know, otherwise, they got left in the streets, all piled up until someone found enough gazlin to burn them. You know. Couldn't let that happen, right? She was my mother."
"Didn't anyone help you?"
Jonath had.
"No," she said. "No one helped me."
He shut his eyes again. She took a deep breath, and tried, really tried, to encapsulate everything she felt into the three words that followed - her understanding, her shock, her affection for him and her sincere wish that it didn't matter so much to him. How easy, she thought, if he didn't care.
"I'm sorry, Dem."
"I know," he said, and his hand found hers.
She was silent.
"I can't," he said. "I shouldn't. It isn't mine to -" And he fell again into that hesitant silence that meant he knew what he wanted to say but not how he wanted to say it. "It isn't mine," he said. "This grief."
"He was your father."
"He was the king," Demetrius said. "That should be reason enough to mourn. But it isn't."
She sighed, and it rattled to her bones. "Mm."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She slid down again so that he was lying next to him, close enough to touch but sensible enough not to as her hand slipped from his, the sleeves of her oversized hoody trailing past her fingertips to graze his waist. "You're my friend, aren't you? And this is what friends are for."
Mocking, teasing, testing.
"You don't have friends."
"Mm. I've noticed."
She settled her cheek on his shoulder. She stared at the wall. She saw the king on the back of her lids whenever she closed her eyes, so she just stared.
"Were you ever in love?"
Who was he thinking of? Angrec? The girl with dark hair and even darker eyes, the girl whose picture he kept even after she was nothing but bones in the ground? Or someone else? Or no one at all, the phantom of what could and should but would never be?
She did not lie to him. "Once. A long time ago."
"What happened?"
"I killed him."
She could feel him breathing, and that reassured her, more than anything, more than her own breath in her lungs or the blood in her veins, that she was alive, alive, alive, still, unbelievably alive. Hadn't that always been the way?
This couldn't last. This would not last.
Storms were coming.
"I'm quite fond of you," she murmured quietly and wasn't sure who she was speaking to or why, only that Demetrius' smile made her feel like she had accomplished something.
"Now," she said, tiredly, pressing her eyes against the sharp bones of his shoulder in lieu of rest. "You should probably get the fuck out of my room. I need to choose a funeral dress."
"I'm sure," he said, sleepily. "You have plenty."
"Why do you think I need to choose?" She smiled. "I have a black dress for every star in the sky," East said. "And, your highness, I've worn them all."
"What a black widow you are. I used to think," Demetrius said. "That you had a heart of gold hidden deep inside of you, East."
"No such thing." She felt sleep grip her and draw her down. "Heart of thorns, maybe."
"Heart of ice," he agreed, and she wasn't sure who fell asleep first, he or she, but was only aware that she was warm, she was not afraid, and she did not dream.
"Ow."
"Shut up," Charlotte said, and Julien looked so surprised at the way that she had spoken to him that he didn't even seem to notice the pain as she pressed the iodine patch to his forehead once more, the blood soaking slowly through the gauze.
She nearly swallowed her tongue in her own shock. When had she become so brave - so bold, so stupid - as to speak against the prince? Not that this was her first violation of the rules.
After last night - and she had to almost close her eyes just thinking of it, shaking her head, cursing her name and his - it was difficult to think of anything she could do to make her situation more precarious. This was thin ice, the thinnest - a knife's edge between survival in the Selection and...
And what? Execution?
Julien was smiling at her. She tried to focus, on him, on what he was saying.
"You're in a better mood," he said.
That was true. She hadn't been exactly forthcoming with the prince, despite their spending the entire morning and afternoon alone, together, sledding in the mountains behind the northern castle. When she had arrived down to the stables after breakfast that morning, she hadn't been able to stifle a little smile at the sight of the wooden sledges, one named Kota, the other named Kenna, nor at the image of composed, regal Julien with a knitted cap covering his fair hair, looking almost as cold and miserable as Charlotte felt at the thought of spending nearly eight hours with him.
She had felt almost glad to see him flip the sled - not just once, not just twice, but thrice; she herself had gone head-over-heels into the snow more than five times. It had been on that final occasion, when she had opened her eyes and saw white, and breathed in snowflakes and ice, that she had also seen blood. It was strange - she had thought that someone as sheltered as a prince would have fainted at a splinter, but Julien barely seemed to notice the gash in his forehead until she had pointed it out to him.
Now he was watching her with an expression that was not quite solemn.
"What?" Charlotte said.
He shrugged. "Forgive me?"
He managed to sound genuine without sounding plaintive, contrite without sounding pitiable, and she marvelled at that - what wondrous manipulation it was. Demetrius (and here he was again, in her thoughts even when he was out of her presence) seemed to have only one setting, one persona, and she had seen plenty of it - he had one mask, and wore it well. But Julien had a dozen, a hundred dozen, and changed them in the space of a heartbeat.
"What is there to forgive?" she said, and handed him the needle to hold for her as she peeled back the gauze to look at the wound.
It took her a second to notice the weary expression on his face, as though he were saying "you know well".
"The broadcast," she said, and he sighed.
"You can't have any secrets if you're to win this Selection," he said, and his tone was quiet and confidential, as though he expected the heavens to smite him down for even saying so. "Anything that can be used against you will be used against you."
"Everyone has secrets," Charlotte said, immediately, biting out the words like venom.
"Not everyone treats them as secrets," Julien said, and she wondered how he would react if she stood up in the dining hall that evening and declared one of his. Would he sit there, smiling, as though she were uttering common knowledge, and act as though the secret had never been such?
"I'm sorry," Julien said. "For hurting you. It was never my intention, Charlotte."
The cabin was cold, the air crisp with that serene purity that seemed to flake off the mountains like gold dust.
"I don't think your intentions matter," she replied, slowly.
"No," he said. "But I'm still sorry."
Silence reigned for a frozen moment as she pulled the iodine patch away and sat back, a few precious inches between them, and watched his face. She didn't even try to hide her open, obvious scrutiny of his expression.
She had to know.
"I'll forgive you if you answer my question," she said, and Julien almost laughed at the mercenary nature of the statement - Charlotte wasn't bothering to manipulate or twist or wheedle. She was just asking.
"For your clemency," he said. "I'll tell you anything."
He was lying.
"Do I have a chance?" Charlotte asked, and the question hung between them on a noose, swaying back and forth and threatening to change everything with a single syllable of an answer. Because if she didn't have a chance - if she didn't have a chance -
She wouldn't have to try. As awful, as forbidden, as that thought was, it was there, solid and real. She wouldn't have to fight this Selection, trying to win a heart she didn't want and a throne she didn't deserve, she could just be. She could go home.
And that small, traitorous part of her that seemed to make all of the worst, self-destructive decisions whispered that Demetrius wouldn't be quite so unreachable if she was no longer one of his brother's Selected.
And if she did, then she would fight. Set aside all else, and she would fight, and she would win. She would have to.
"You wouldn't be here," Julien said softly. "If you didn't."
Charlotte looked at him, met his eyes, and saw no mistruth there.
"Really?" She didn't mean to say it, but the word slipped from her lips without permission, rogue syllables hissing into the chilled air.
"Really," he said and she shook her head.
"Why?" she whispered, and he seemed to understand without her saying more, although she did. "How often have you spoken to me, Julien? You danced with me once - and didn't speak to me - this is our first date - and we haven't spoken until now - you don't know me. You can't know me. Why are you keeping me and sending away so many good, kind, generous girls?"
She watched his face for the answer, unsure if she could trust the one he spoke.
"Is it because of -" And she stopped herself, and shook her head again, dispelling the thought like so many cobwebs.
"Because you're Charlotte Cohen, the war hero?" He smiled, fractionally, almost unnoticeable. "At first. You were popular. You would make an excellent queen."
"At first?"
His eyes seemed faraway as he nodded. "At first. And then someone... talked sense into me. Someone I should listen to more often. My life is too short to spend it with someone I don't love. And I don't love anyone in the Selection. But I realised..." His voice dropped low, quiet. "I realised that I could. Love you, I mean. Or any of the others. That's why you're here. Still here. And I suppose that's unfair of me, because I've decided that I could, and I have no clue if you could."
"I could," Charlotte said, and she absolutely meant it.
Julien smiled.
"But you can't use me," she said. "You can't - you can't manipulate me like that. During the Report, I mean. Julien, my secrets matter to me. The girl I've become - she wouldn't have done those things, and I hate the way people look at me when they realise who I was, and it's as though who I am now doesn't matter a bit. I've cried and I've bled and I've done everything I can to put those awful things behind me, but if you keep dredging them up to use them as daggers against me..."
"I truly am," he said. "Sorry."
"Yeah," she said, and there was steel in her voice now.
The rebels, Demetrius, the war, everything else - it could wait. Charlotte Cohen was here to win the Selection and that was what she was going to do.
She almost took Julien's hand, but her fingers faltered above his, uncertain. "Thank you," she said, and sounded like she meant it.
Lights exploded against the far wall, and she turned to see twin beams sweep through the frosted window of the cabin and come to a focus against the far wall. She and Julien share a confused look before Julien slid down from where he had sat on the lone table and crossed to the door. There were two guards outside, stepping out from a large car, and between them stood one of the counsel, a small, dark-skinned woman, and Charlotte didn't need to see Julien's face to see that this could not possibly be good news. The guard nearest to the cabin took his cap from his head and clasped it to his chest as he walked closer, slowly, and the counsel spread her hands wide and spoke softly.
Julien shook his head. Charlotte stood and walked closer, words coming into focus as she approached.
"...coronation," Counsel Patel said. "The Selection..."
Charlotte came to Julien's side. Her hand found hers. He clung to her like a drowning man.
"The king is dead," the counsel was saying. Above her, the clouds were dissipating into snowflakes, a blizzard on the horizon encroaching fast and frozen, and Charlotte was certain that any tears she allowed would crystallise on her skin, so she kept her gaze clear and only the falter of her heart confirmed that she was not dreaming. "Long live the king."
King Julien was looking beyond her, to the snow-bound grounds of the castle far below them, and Charlotte was not certain what he was contemplating, only that the king was dead.
THE SELECTED
Evangeline Jones-Fitzwilliams
Eden Lamarie
Eilinora Winslow
Jesse Wren
Clementine Georges
Lani Watson
East Smith
Adalyn Larson
Anabel Moritz
Maya Hartwick
Rosalyn Akerman
Charlotte Cohen